Flade Gallusschulhaus

Source: http://www.flickr.com. Uploaded to Flickr by Florian Hardwig and tagged with “ffdin”. License: All Rights Reserved.

The Flade is a Catholic secondary school and the successor to St. Gallen’s monastic school. In its all-lowercase logo, the ‘f’ bar is to the left side only. To anyone with some knowledge about the history of letters, this reads ‘slade’, not ‘flade’ – it’s a ‘long s’ (ſ).

On the Tÿpo Letter Walk, my theory was that the designer scrolled through the glyph palette and suddenly stumbled upon a ‘fancy f’ that would spice up the logo. This doesn’t hold water, though: FF DIN does have an ‘ſ’, but it has no spur. The right half of the bar has been deliberately cut off here.